Fast Company: The Women of Twitter

In late January, soon after this story went to press, Twitter announced a new censorship policy that establishes procedures for removing posts that violate national law in countries around the world. Opinion has been divided about whether the company was caving to commercial demands as it expands internationally, or in fact deploying a clever anticensorship policy in line with Twitter’s pro–free expression stance. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org) and other civil liberties groups pointed to the policy’s fine print—which makes life difficult for governments trying to censor tweets, and easy for users trying to evade censorship. Twitter will remove non-spam posts only after receiving a valid legal notice, which it will publish on its website, along with a clear indication of what has been censored. Twitter also issued what amounted to instructions for accessing censored tweets by viewing them on offshore servers.

At a media conference in January, Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo said the company is simply trying to deal with the situation in “the most honest, transparent, and forward-looking way. You can’t reside in countries and not operate within the law.”

Chloe Sladden smiles as she asks, cognizant of the absurdity of the question. She doesn’t wait for a response from her team before proposing that Kermit conduct interviews with the soon-to-be-announced Oscar nominees. “Kermit’s not on Twitter,” answers Omid Ashtari, a gaunt, stylishly unshaven former Hollywood talent agent. Sladden recruited him from Creative Artists Agency to lead outreach to celebrities.

This report is greeted with disbelief around the conference table. But after a quick search, it emerges that Ashtari is correct. While there’s @Kermit_J_Frog and @KermitOfficial, there’s no Twitter handle with a blue symbol indicating that it’s been verified as the character’s legitimate voice.

“Well, so, fine,” says Sladden, steering the idea toward pairing up Academy Award nominees to engage in Twitter dialogues, or having past winners interview the contenders. Looking glamorous in stovepipe trousers and a pale peach dotted blouse, and talking at a caffeinated speed she later tells me was slowed down for my benefit, Twitter’s 37-year-old director of media partnerships recalls the relentless Faye Dunaway character in the 1976 film Network.

This brainstorming session, held at the company’s San Francisco headquarters, is about the same thing most meetings at Twitter seem to be about—namely, getting interesting people to do interesting things on the platform. Sladden’s team no longer encounters the blanket skepticism it once met with, but it is still a minority of celebrities who have embraced Twitter as an organic, authentic way to relate to their fans, as @ladygaga (eighteen million followers) or @kanyewest (six million) has. In rapid succession, Sladden pushes through novelists (“I will die if I can ever convince Richard Ford to do this,” she says), ways the “heritage” band Duran Duran might use Twitter on an upcoming reunion tour, and an experiment with Fox News in real-time polling about whether the presidential candidates were answering or dodging questions posed in a Republican-­primary debate in South Carolina. It’s like the dialogue on an Aaron Sorkin show: Ideas are tested; banter is exchanged; cultural references fly by at 60 mph. When the meeting ends, it is unclear what exactly has been accomplished, but a lot has been commented upon in a clever, pithy way. Being at Twitter is, in fact, a lot like being on Twitter.

The previous day I’d sat in on another meeting, led by Katie Jacobs Stanton, who directs the company’s international expansion. This one focused on Germany, Twitter’s next big push following intensive efforts in Ireland and Japan. In the wake of the earthquake and the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan has embraced the platform with exceptional enthusiasm. In December, Japanese users set a record of 25,088 tweets per second during a television broadcast of the beloved animated film Castle in the Sky. This nearly tripled the previous record of 8,868 tweets per second, set after the revelation of Beyoncé’s “baby bump” at the MTV Video Music Awards in August. Here the conversation focused on building a presence in Berlin, and a partnership with German soccer clubs.

A slender, blonde mother of three with a simple, subdued style, the 42-year-old Stanton is as tempered as Sladden is frenetic. She favors long tailored jackets matched with boots and jeans, and had arrived that morning with enough home-baked goodies for the whole floor. But her meeting had the same freewheeling style, with ideas coming from everyone present about how to help Germans appreciate the value of Twitter.

Other issues Stanton handles are far more consequential, as indicated by her rank (56) on the Forbes list of the world’s most powerful women. A graduate of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, Stanton spent six years at Google before she was approached by Twitter about a job in 2008. Instead, she relocated to Washington, D.C., with her husband, who works in clean technology for the Danish Foreign Ministry. Having volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign, she joined the president’s new-media team as director of citizen participation. After getting the White House up and running on Twitter, she moved over to work in Hillary Clinton’s office of innovation, with a focus on integrating technology, especially social media, into American foreign policy. When she was ready to go back to California, Stanton asked Dick Costolo, then Twitter’s COO, whether she could work there and leave the office at five or six o’clock, to get home to her kids—Ellie, now eleven, and nine-year-old twins Declan and Caleigh—in Los Altos. To her surprise, Costolo said it was totally fine. “I honestly can’t imagine having that same conversation with the CEO at Google,” she says.

Since Stanton arrived in July 2010, her work has remained at the politically sensitive center of the upheavals in the Arab world. Twitter has played a pivotal role in organizing protests in Egypt, Syria, and Bahrain and, perhaps more important, in getting news in and out of those and other countries lacking a free press. Founded to promote an open flow of information, the company believes that “Freedom of expression is an essential human right,” to quote a tweet from Biz Stone, one of its founders. In practice, this has meant siding with victims and opponents of political repression in a way few other tech companies would dare to do.

When we meet later in the Twitter cafeteria, Stanton tells me one of her favorite recent stories. The Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy, who writes for The Washington Post and other publications, had reportedly been detained and sexually assaulted by security forces in Cairo a few weeks earlier, in November. While being held, Eltahawy borrowed a mobile phone and despite a broken left arm and right hand managed to tweet “beaten arrested in interior ministry” to her 65,000 followers. Among those who retweeted her message was Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist who has used Twitter to report on his own scrapes with Arab authority to more than a million followers. The State Department tweeted back that it was aware of the situation. It was like an Amnesty International campaign in real time. Twelve hours after her arrest, El­tahawy tweeted: “I AM FREE.”

“It’s stuff like that that moves us,” Stanton says, “that makes us excited that we can provide some kind of service to allow that important story to find its way out there, to have happy outcomes like this.”

Twitter is more humanistic than other tech start-ups, less defined by introverted math majors and engineers, and perhaps as a result friendlier to women, who were well represented at the meetings I attended. It prides itself on a culture of openness and egalitarianism, in which innovation percolates up from users rather than being pushed out from headquarters. This begins with its office in a nondescript former AT&T building near SFMOMA. No one at Twitter, including CEO Costolo and chairman Jack Dorsey, has a door, or even a cubicle divider. Costolo sits in the back row of the open floor plan, surrounded by Sladden, Stanton, and a handful of other top executives. There are no land lines, and the dress code is strictly casual. Most meetings and socializing happen in the central common area on the sixth floor, where everyone queues at noon for the delicious free lunch (a recent menu boasts “toasted pearl pasta and umbria fregola” and “blackened tempeh steaks”), followed by complicated, West Coast–style recycling. Since everyone follows everyone else on Twitter, conversations begin in midstream. Your colleagues already know what you did last weekend.

Twitter was invented by Dorsey as a side project when he was working on a podcasting start-up with cofounder Evan Williams. Dorsey has strong design sense and a lifelong interest in solving urban problems through technology. The tool he first tested in 2006 attacked the problem of one-to-many communication by paring it down to its essentials. Applying an arbitrary-seeming 140-­character limit used in SMS messaging (before these packets were routinely woven together for wordier texting) gave his nascent platform an appeal that transcended its utility. Twitter cut against blogging’s tendency toward logorrhea, driving a countervailing trend toward concision. The company left it to others to figure out how to use its platform, what to use it for, and even how to make money with it.

“Twitter didn’t make up the hashtag. Twitter didn’t make up the retweet,” Stanton says, referring to the # symbol for filtering topics and the use of “RT” as shorthand when passing along messages from others. “It’s our users. And people started using them so much that we decided to weave them into the product. I can’t think of another company that has taken its users’ actions and said, ‘We’re going to make them useful to everybody.’ ”

As usage exploded, Dorsey was eased out by Williams and cofounder Biz Stone, who brought focus to managing an enterprise valued in the billions that hadn’t figured out what business it was in, and that continued to fail during traffic spikes. A little over a year ago, with an advertising-based business model more or less established, Dorsey returned as chairman. He now divides his time between Twitter and Square, one of Silicon Valley’s buzziest start-ups, which enables individuals to accept credit-card payments on their mobile phones. Dorsey’s return and Costolo’s ascendance to CEO have ended the era of frequent crashes and offering only a basic product with few features. Until recently, Twitter users needed a third-party application, such as TweetDeck (now owned by Twitter), if they wanted more functionality, like shortening Web URLs to save characters when posting links. In December, the company released a redesigned interface that has for the first time made its own home page and mobile applications, rather than various third-party products, the best way to experience Twitter.

It is also only recently that—owing to a combination of advertising, licensing its content to search engines, and selling access to its trove of aggregate data—profitability has seemed close enough to provoke intense speculation among outside analysts. Monetization continues to take a backseat to growth, however. The company’s ultimate ambition is to expand from its present 150 million active registered users and 250 million tweets per day to a service relevant to “every person on the planet.” Although the company’s valuation hit $8 billion with a recent round of outside investment, no one at Twitter talks or seems to think much about an IPO. Costolo, who early in his career was an improv comedian in Chicago and sometimes performs a kind of stand-up act during Friday all-company meetings in the cafeteria, brings a sense of insouciance and perspective to its huge ambition. Wiry and balding, with a perennial five o’clock shadow, he tends to frame the company’s mission in the form of jokes. Costolo says that for Twitter, revenue is like oxygen—“necessary for life, but it’s not the purpose of life.”

For users, openness is both an invitation to contribute to the product and a style of self-expression. Lessons in good tweeting invariably stress writing in the first person and revealing something of your personality. Successful tweeters are mildly indiscreet, sharing details about their personal lives (and often oversharing). The tone of Twitter is spontaneous, urgent, and fun, juxtaposing the mundane, the monumental, and the playful. One of the implications of this, as Sladden says, is that a celebrity’s persona is no longer “ossified,” with limited opportunities for redefinition. “Now it’s this fluid thing.”

A list of figures who have used Twitter to reshape their public images includes the chef Mario Batali, who tweets answers to questions in a culinary version of NPR’s Car Talk; Salman Rushdie, who conducts hashtag votes on “literary smackdowns” (David Foster Wallace vs. Thomas Pynchon, or Jane Austen vs. Charlotte Brontë); Diane von Furstenberg, whose tweets are a colorful mix of fashion advice and inspirational mantras; Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, who fields complaints and calls for help from his constituents (coming personally to shovel snow for people trapped during a storm); and Ai Weiwei, the artist and human-rights advocate who has continued to use Twitter in defiance of the Chinese government’s conditions in releasing him from prison last June. A photograph with a quotation from Ai adorns the wall in Twitter’s New York office: "What is freedom of speech, Twitter is."

Sladden’s first job was as an assistant at the Robbins Office, a literary agency in New York. She loved working with writers but hated the industry’s resistance to change. “They were so terrified of the eBook,” she told me. “And I thought, I’m not going to sit around for a decade and wait for it.”

She got excited about the emergence of interactive TV while working in the media practice at Booz Allen, the management-consulting firm. “I was in love with the idea that this thing could change the format, the user experience, the creative process,” she says. After an MBA at Stanford, she went to work at Current TV in San Francisco, where she lives with her boyfriend—a carpenter who designs chicken coops—in Dogpatch, an industrial-turned-hipster area on the east side. Her “aha” moment was seeing thousands of tweets sent during Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. “Twitter was the interactive TV platform I’d spent ten years looking for,” she says. “I can’t tell you how exciting it was to see. Here was a partner that had the most amazing content, and that they wanted us to go and create new things out of.”

Sladden wasn’t sure Twitter understood how powerful its platform could be for other kinds of television, and evangelized her way into a job there in April 2009. Her mandate was to get the entertainment industry and news media, from MTV to the NFL, to integrate audience participation into its programs. “The old-school sense is that you want everyone to be leaning back and just absorbing your content,” she says. “The truth is that viewers are engaging in real time, synchronously. Every TV show is the same pattern.” Despite time-shift viewing, 80 percent of tweets about any show happen while it’s being broadcast, or in the first 20 minutes afterward.

With the goal of making Twitter a “canvas for creative people,” Sladden constantly brings the issue back to the question of “storytelling”—how to create a narrative that engages users beyond passive viewing on the flat screen. On Glee, characters tweet commentary. On the Syfy network, programs use Twitter to trace alternate story lines. The NBC series Community has experimented with characters tweeting in their own voice while the show is being aired. “One of our best rules is, can we see an example of it out there already, or is there someone who will come and do it with us,” she says. “What’s so special about Twitter is that it’s essentially collaborative.”

Twitter may be best understood as the antithesis of Facebook—which is why even people who use both social networks tend to be partisans of one or the other. Facebook is a walled garden, a second Internet that can only be used as intended. On Facebook, you cultivate a private community, interacting primarily with people you know offline to extend your social life. Twitter, by contrast, is inherently public—you engage mostly with people you don’t know. This explains why younger people often gravitate more to Facebook, while those who have, or want, an audience often find Twitter more appealing. Facebook is more social. Twitter is more media.

All news now essentially breaks first on Twitter, and it’s axiomatic that the more relevant something is to you personally, the more likely you are to find out about it via the people you follow. Twitter is where I got early word of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, that the earthquake that vibrated my desk chair in August was a mild one centered in Virginia, and that the pond where I sometimes skate on weekends wasn’t yet frozen at the end of December. For those of us who cover politics, Twitter distills the best points, jokes, and actual news in a way that makes it an indispensable tool. Tweets often are the news, such as Rick Perry’s announcement that he wasn’t dropping out after his fifth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses and would carry on to South Carolina. In a very real sense, it’s where a presidential campaign now happens, as candidates talk to voters, their campaigns talk to the press, and journalists talk to one another.

Facebook cares most about creating a dominating business and aspires to become the next Microsoft, Google, or Apple. Twitter cares more about its societal role—with its revenue model still a work in progress, it is about to move into new headquarters in the vast Art Deco Mart building, in one of the shabbiest sections of San Francisco’s Market Street skid row, with the quixotic hope of revitalizing the neighborhood. The company spent many months distilling its ten core values to the length of two tweets. Among them are “Communicate fearlessly to build trust” and “Defend and respect the user’s voice.” In Costolo’s words, “We’re the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.”

Given the centrality of social media to protest movements from Syria to China to Russia, these contrasting attitudes have real consequences. Facebook, whose business is based on the collection of personal data, doesn’t allow anonymity and has gone so far as to delete the pseudonymous account of the Chinese dissident Michael Anti. Under its “real names” policy, George Orwell wouldn’t be allowed to have a Facebook page. Salman Rushdie recently had his Facebook page deactivated when someone pointed out that his given name was actually “Ahmed.” Facebook restored his account only after Rushdie staged a voluble protest—on Twitter. Twitter, by contrast, doesn’t care what your real name is; it lets a hundred Kermits bloom. The company goes so far as to describe helping users evade government censorship as part of its job. “We want to build our business in a way that makes us proud,” Stanton tells me. “If it means that we have to start censoring people’s tweets, that violates a core ethos of our company. While it might help us get more users in China, it would ruin what we’re about.”

I ended the second day of my visit back in the cafeteria talking to Stanton and Sladden about what makes Twitter such an appealing way to get the news—something it wasn’t designed for but does brilliantly. As important as its utility for personalization, Sladden points out, is the feeling of community that comes with big events on Twitter.

“Whether it’s something as dark as Osama bin Laden’s assassination or as playful and wonderful as the Oscars, you join with the world to experience that together,” she says, slowing herself down for a few seconds to reflect. “It’s that hook, that addictive moment of knowing you’re truly connected to other people.”